I'm still wondering if I'm going to like this more than the other Battlefield titles I've played (mostly 1942 and BF2, with a bit of Vietnam recently).
You have to unlock a lot of stuff at the beginning, though. (Notably, playing medic with the starting PKM really, REALLY sucks when you keep getting dropped with ease; things start getting easier with the M249 and Type 88, though, and the dreaded M60 does wonders for fending off foes so you can revive any downed teammates.) BF2 at least had decent default weapons for the most part, and 1942/Vietnam hadn't introduced unlocks yet.
Positional audio cues don't seem as distinct as the older games, maybe because they didn't use EAX/DirectSound3D/OpenAL this time. They're definitely there, but too subtle to notice against all the ambience and whatnot for some reason.
Gameplay-wise, it's definitely more focused and fluid, as you'd expect of a game with a 32-player cap rather than the usual 64-player cap of the older iterations. I guess that part of it has to do with the new-to-PC-players Rush game mode, where NOT hitting the M-COMs hard and fast will be a sure loss for the attacking team. In any case, the feel is most definitely NOT traditional 1942/Vietnam/BF2.
The destructable buildings and slightly deformable terrain do change things up significantly from past titles. Liked to take cover in one of those wooden shacks on Wake Island because they'd hold up against tank shells? Not happening here-you'll just see a gaping hole where your precious cover used to be, and you might have been blown away along with the wall if you were too close! The terrain craters left behind from things like mortar strikes may not seem like much, but then you realize the somewhat bothersome effect they can have on tanks and other such vehicles when you try to drive over them. I also recall seeing one of the M-COM stations in Port Valdez basically reduced to a giant rectangular crater with the target crate somehow still intact.
One thing that really worries me, though? EA and DICE still own all those dedicated servers-they're apparently just being rented. No LAN options, either. I'm concerned because several years from now, they may just pull the plug on all those servers and make me feel like I wasted US$20. Something similar might happen with BF2 if the account server goes down, but I'm pretty sure that can be played through LAN with offline accounts, and we have tunneling/VPN apps to get around that anyway. 1942 and Vietnam should have nothing to worry about as long as someone wants to host a server for them.